Mickadeit: Great Park reform starts swiftly, decisively

Orange County Great Park board member Bill Kogerman, left, speaks during a special meeting of the board as fellow board members Michael Pinto, Beth Krom and Walkie Ray, from left, listen at Irvine City Hall on Monday.PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Political theater doesn't get any better. There was the added bonus that important stuff got done, but let's at least take a few moments first to relish the sweeping grandeur of the 81/2-hour mud run that was the Tuesday night/Wednesday morning meeting of the Irvine City Council.

How fitting that on Richard Nixon's 100th birthday we had a lineup of living members of the OC Political Hall of Fame engaged in some of the most memorable public debate we've seen in some time, ranging from confrontational invective, to snide backbiting, to reasoned discourse, to what even sounded toward the end like a plea for mercy.

There were veterans Larry Agran and Christina Shea duking it out on the dais. Public speakers included the ageless and classy Marian Bergeson, venerable environmental activist Elisabeth Brown, and, most memorably, Todd Spitzer, back in his old county supervisor uniform. All five of the aforementioned are first-ballot Hall of Famers. But there was plenty of other talent, much of it not even from Irvine: former Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook, Bill Kogerman, Stu Mollrich and Walkie Ray. And, of course, on the dais also were council members Jeff Lalloway and Beth Krom and Mayor Steven Choi.

The new Choi-Lalloway-Shea majority did three things: 1) eliminated the four independent members of the Great Park Board; 2) immediately terminated the controversial contract with its PR firm and the noncontroversial one with its lobbyist; 3) authorized an audit of the Great Park books.

It did so after much input from the neutered Agran-Krom duo, the affected parties and the public, but it also did so without giving quarter. At the end, the decisions came down virtually bereft of compromise. The New Irvine Order. Or, as Krom put it, in reference to the axing of the contracts, "this is guillotine action."

Krom and Agran tried to paint the reform measures as sudden, reckless, harsh and just plain mean.

To an individual not steeped in GP history, it might look that way. But to those who've been around GP politics for nine years, these appeared to be crocodile tears shed by Agran and Krom – a grand virtuoso display that threatened to float away the voluminous stacks of plans, maps and reports that Agran had staff haul onto the floor of council chambers to purportedly show how much bang the GP had really gotten for its buck under his and Krom's stewardship.

It actually proved the opposite: more than $200 million should have bought a significant park, not a significant bundle of papers and park that consists of, as Spitzer derisively noted, "a palm court, a merry-go-round and a balloon."

In fact, most of what Agran and Krom lamented could have and should have been dealt with years ago when they did run things. They should have come up with a way to truly share power rather than the farcical GP board they concocted. They should have put the Forde & Mollrich contract out to bid. They should have demanded a rigorous follow-up to a 2009 audit that raised troubling questions.

They burned through money. An L.A. Times analysis calculated that of the more than $200 million spent on the park, only about $38 million can be traced to in-the-ground improvements. In contrast, the city and park has paid F&M $19.8 million over the past 14 years, an amount Lalloway called "grossly absurd."

As an utterly enraged, red-in-the-face Spitzer said during his three-minute dressing-down of Agran (for Agran's questioning of Spitzer's pro-GP bona fides): "You had your chance!"

Spitzer flat-out accused the former Agran majority of giving no-bid contracts to "people who had no business having these ... lucrative contracts year after year for one reason: they did the political bidding of people who wanted to remain elected, (people) who got elected."

For all of his reasoned defenses and argument regarding the other matters on the table, Agran offered no reasoned defense of the no-bid aspect of the F&M contract. Nor did he address the alleged cronyism. The decade of Agran-Krom control, the benefits they doled out to political supporters, the let-them-eat-cake arrogance of it all when challenged. ... When the revolution comes, it comes hard. The guillotine indeed.

Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com.

Orange County Great Park board member Bill Kogerman, left, speaks during a special meeting of the board as fellow board members Michael Pinto, Beth Krom and Walkie Ray, from left, listen at Irvine City Hall on Monday. PAUL BERSEBACH, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer addresses the Irvine City Council during public comments on three big Great Park proposals it was set to vote on during their council meeting Tuesday night. KEVIN SULLIVAN, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Irvine City Council member Larry Agran defends the status quo for the Irvine Great Park Board of Directors during a city council meeting Tuesday night. KEVIN SULLIVAN, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer addresses the Irvine City Council during public comments on three big Great Park proposals it was set to vote on during their council meeting Tuesday night. KEVIN SULLIVAN, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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